On Wednesday, Apple released both developer and public-tester versions the fourth beta for its next current-release update for OS X and iOS, and a developer-only fourth beta for tvOS. Developers are also expecting to gain access to a second beta for the major upgrades to these and watchOS in the near future, as it has been two weeks since the first beta was released at WWDC. The latest updates -- iOS 9.3.3, OS X 10.11.6, and tvOS 9.2.2 -- are focused on bug fixes, along with security and performance enhancements, as usual....

Editor's Note: Today marks the ninth anniversary of the iPhone's initial sale to the public. On June 29, 2007, the smartphone that effectively changed the mobile phone industry, and arguably computing as a whole, overnight was put on sale in Apple Stores, though with this Best Of MacNN post, we're instead looking at an earlier event, namely when it was first unveiled onstage by Apple chief Steve Jobs during Macworld....

Apple's latest version of its desktop OS has picked up a rebrand, bringing it into alignment with its tvOS, watchOS, and iOS lowercase stablemates. The rebrand also suggests that Apple is going to settle into a pattern of continually evolving its desktop OS iteratively -- OS X is now macOS in perpetuity, with the internal codename now taking top billing. While it naturally picks up several new marquee features, the arrival of Siri on the Mac is by far the biggest news in macOS Sierra. Read on for our initial thoughts....

While in no way legal or binding, The Little Las Vegas Chapel has played host to an unusual ceremony where a man named Aaron Chervenak had a commitment ceremony to "marry" his iPhone. While the groom himself did not comment, chapel owner Michael Kelly, who has overseen similar ceremonies involving pets "getting married" or "weed weddings" where people professed their love for marijuana, said the "iPhone marriage" was intended as a statement on society's dependence on the devices....

Apple has come up with a way to control functions of a smartphone, via infrared light. The recently published patent for "Systems and methods for receiving infrared data with a camera designed to detect images based on visible light" (9,380,225) suggests infrared light received by a sensor could be used to transmit data to the device, forcing functions to work in specific ways, or in some applications, temporarily disabling some elements entirely....

For quite a while now, MacNN sometimes finds a deal that is too big or important to go into our other deal lists, and is deserving enough to be highlighted inside its own Big Deals post. Even though the clock is running out for MacNN, we're still going to point out the deals we think you will enjoy like we always have. Like last summer, we've found one of the largest photography bundles deals available, with the aptly named The Big Deal 2016 from Foto Promos....

Apple is helping to fund the music videos of artists and bands, as part of its plan to gain exclusives for its streaming music service. Executives from both Apple and elsewhere in the industry advised to a report the iPhone producer has helped finance musical projects, including Drake's Hotline Bling and MIA's Borders videos, to not only get content for its subscribers not available anywhere else, but also to make Apple Music a more attractive place to be, in a similar vein to MTV in the 1990's....

When asked to choose among several possible tools to do a job, qualified technical people look at the manual and test to see if the tool actually does what they need it to do. Is it reasonably configurable? Must it have root privilege to launch, or can it be installed as your application login id? Smarter folks will do a load test to see if it will scale beyond a handful of records and work with the expected volumes of data. And all of this will be combined to form an informed opinion as to whether the tool is appropriate for the task at hand.

High Level Managers have a different approach. They are too busy to deal with mere technical details.

After numerous outages at a large multi-national bank, a high level manager decided that they needed to do something to stabilize things, so he put together numerous charts to compare the various software packages that were available to automate solving their problems. There were slide shows, spreadsheets and myriad documents detailing how one tool was better than the others and that it would solve all of their problems.

The only problem with his analysis was that it was not based upon actual features or testing, but on the sales brochures and promises made by the salesman.

Not to let the facts get in the way of managing a problem, several suitcases of money were provisioned and turned over to the salesman in exchange for a full all-bells-and-whistles site license for the new tool. The new tool was brought in house and ran through a few simple test cases. Then it went live in production. Then it hit the fan.

Bob was brought in to see why their applications were crashing in spite of their shiny new be-all end-all tool.

Queries that should have completed in milliseconds took several minutes to complete. The tool was sucking up 80GB of memory just to launch in basic mode. And we're not even going to go into how the tool mistook email addresses for websites it had to crawl.

The manager, realizing that the salesman had lied to him, had to deal with the spilled milk, and opted to forge ahead at all costs.

Bob created a web app that alleviated the worst problems by pre-massaging input and query results. He could not push away a gnawing suspicion that he was merely repairing damage rather than adding actual value to the company.

After about a year of this, the manager committed to drastic changes in the work processes. When Bob learned about this, he asked them if they'd even done rough, back-of-napkin estimations of the expected manual workload in the changed process; after all, they already had a wealth of data from the past year and estimations surely could be done given the new process was specified in substantial detail. After all, they had gotten burned on their 'analysis' of the product they bought to solve all the instability. He was met with blank stares.

The new process was put in place and the amount of manual work tripled overnight.

Bob put in a lot of overtime trying to fight all manner of fires. Still, he was only partially successful, as the task of developing an app to totally fix the situation for a huge and complex package on top of a pretty complex work process was out of the question for a single developer.

After many, many months of this ongoing failure, the manager who started all of this had analysed the cause of the all of problems. The entire team was called in by the manager to a meeting. As could be expected, it was announced that the productivity was deemed too low while the risk and cost were too high, and so the entire team; analysts, lower level managers and Bob were laid off.

The manager was promoted for recognizing the cause of the failures and was given more responsibility to oversee other projects in addition to his own.

We've reviewed several things by Moshi over time, and they are among a handful of other companies you can count on to make high-quality stuff that's well thought-out. One of their newest products is their entry into non-earbud headphones, and it's a pair of on-ear cans that offer a stylish look and very good sound (after a bit -- more about that later). There are people who want great sound and a reasonable amount of noise isolation without the weight and bulk of over-ear headsets: will the Avanti fit the bill? Find out in our review....

The "Trade Up with Installments" plan from Apple Stores that allows customers to buy new iPhones with built-in yearly upgrade options for set monthly payments saw some minor changes on Tuesday. The new plans offer customers more flexibility in how they use the money they earn from trading in the older smartphone, but lowers the maximum value of a trade-in from $300 to $250. The changes are only for the Trade-Up option, and don't affect the similar iPhone Upgrade Program....

Editor's Note: crazy lawsuit stories are a special favorite among the staff as we reminisce on the stories that stood out as particularly memorable, and we have plenty of them. For every legit-but-ultimately-unsuccessful patent lawsuit or the exceedingly rare occasion where Apple is found guilty of something, there's a dozen "huh?" lawsuits. We are proud of our in-depth analysis and reporting of the Samsung-Apple battles, or the DOJ-Apple court fight, or our coverage of the California hiring-agreement case, where Apple was very clearly in the wrong. Forgive us, though; its hard to summarize th...

Every day until our closure later this week, we are showcasing some of the offers available from our MacNN Deals store. Today's selections are all accessories for your Apple Watch, including a pair of charging docks, a stylish wooden stand, and the ability to create your own customized watch band to one that shows off your personality....

Evernote is making a number of changes to its three different levels of service, increasing the charges for those subscribed to either of the paid tiers. The announced changes to the Plus and Premium tiers note-taking service also include alterations to the free plan, with users of Evernote Basic now limited to accessing their account from just two devices, instead being able to use it on as many devices as they wanted....

Florida resident Thomas S. Ross on Monday filed a lawsuit with the Florida Southern District Court alleging that Apple infringes upon his unpatented 1992 submission of an "Electronic Reading Device" that does imagine a device not dissimilar to the Newton, and is seeking $10 billion in damages and a 1.5 percent royalty on all of Apple's iOS devices. The court filing notes that the plaintiff "was the first to file a device so designed and aggregated," but admits that the patent application was declared abandoned in 1995 because Ross never paid the required application fees....

Editor's note: As we are winding down site operations, the staff of MacNN is rerunning some personal favorite stories, both those that are important, and those that are favorite memorable moments in the world of technology news. I'm staff writer Malcolm Owen, and while this isn't exactly a story relating to Apple directly, it does show the effects of when another store tries to do the same thing, specifically concerning musical guests....

New rules introduced by the Chinese government are going to increase the monitoring of the country's citizens, by forcing mobile app stores to keep track of their users. Apple and other app store owners are ordered by new rules issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China to keep records of user activity for a period of time, as well as establish the identity of both the users and the app developers, in order to crack down on the viewing and distribution of banned content....

Are you someone who works outside of the office on a regular basis and needs a powerful yet easy-to-carry notebook to do you work in, or simply want to get a free upgrade? This is a reminder that you may want to enter this MacNN Deals giveaway, one that will continue to run after MacNN's closure this week, that will provide one lucky winner with a MacBook valued at $1,300....

Apple is under investigation by a regulator in South Korea, over "some matters" relating to agreements and deals the iPhone producer has in the country. Advised earlier today in a parliamentary hearing, South Korea's Fair Trade Commission Chairman Jeong Jae-chan confirmed there is a probe underway relating to Apple, but the anti-competition regulatory head did not disclose any details about what specifically it is examining....